2010/08/31

(Don’t know if this has been fixed in recent Outlook versions, we use 2002 here…)

An employee called and explained the following error to me: He was trying to open different attachments from his sent mails and got randomly a “file not found” error. After some research I found out that the filenames of most attachments were “Angebot.pdf” (the German word for “offer”). So I opened up ProcMon on his system, set the filesystem filter, did a search for “Angebot” and finally saw this:

So Outlook tries to save a temporary copy of the file in temporary internet files and when a file with the same name already exists, Outlook is adding a number to the filename. In this case it looks like the user had not cleaned up his temporary internet files for quite some time. And above from that Outlook 2002 can only count up to 99 and then fails with the “file not found” error 😉

UPDATE:
Cleaning up the temporary files isn’t the solution. Outlook’s own folder for storing temporary files (attachments and such) is stored in the variable OutlookSecureTempFolder in the windows registry (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Security in my case). So you have to clean up this folder which can easily done by a logon/logoff script and this little tool.

2009/07/22

Today I searched for a simple solution for automatic profile creation on the first Outlook start (I wanted this for our new XenApp terminalserver). It took a while until I found some useful information about that, but I was too lazy for most solutions (netlogon scripts, WSH scripting etc.) – they were just not simple enough. Above from that, Office XP (and therefore Outlook) was installed already. To make a long story short, here is what I did:

The Office Resource Kit includes the Custom Installation Wizard (CIW), which can generate a .PRF (Outlook profile, including account information and stuff) file. In my case, I just needed to tell Outlook that it should use the user’s Windows logon name for authentication and the Exchange server hostname. Just skip the first steps in CIW until you get to the profile creation. Do the configuration and save the .prf file to a commonly available location, e.g. a networkshare (remember the UNC path). After that I followed these steps on the TS:

– Login as Administrator and run regedit
– Load C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\NTUSER.DAT
– In the loaded hive, browse to Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Setup (create the missing keys!)
– Create a new String Value called ImportPRF and enter the path and filename of the .PRF as the value
– Unload the hive and close regedit
– Check if it works

2009/03/30

Per default, deleted items are always moved in the “Deleted Items”-folder of the user who deleted them. This is in fact not optimal when you have set up delegations.
This behavior can be changed by editing a key in the registry of the delegate: